How to Avoid Click Fraud

Dont make the mistake of click fraud and getting your Google Adsense disabled.

Google’s AdSense program is very popular and for some web sites very profitable. When something like this becomes popular there always seems to be people who find a way to abuse it. That is what has happened with the AdSense program. The main abuse is called click fraud, when advertisers pay people for clicking on their ads they really shouldn’t have to pay.

Since 2003 you have noticed the Google ads on web sites and have probably clicked on your share of these ads because you were interested in them. When you clicked on those ads, the person who owns the web site you’re on gets paid for your clicking on the ads. The advertiser pays Google for these ads as well. You might have joined the Google AdSense program by now and get paid for others to display their ads on your web and blog sites.

Click fraud hurts the advertisers, the web sites owners who earn revenue by displaying ads and the general public who used the Internet to search for products and companies. CPC stands for cost-per-click and is an Internet marketing formula that is used to price ads. Advertisers will pay Internet publishers based on the number of clicks a certain ad will get. Certain businesses are very competitive and bid high for this. When there is fraud, these businesses are hurt, the fake clicks cause their advertising budget to go over and no one is happy about that. Click fraud can be done with automation, such as specific programs clicking on ads or by people who are paid just to click on ads. Another type of fraud is done by someone clicking on their competitor’s ads as this can deplete their budgets for marketing and skews their search results.

If there is click fraud on your site you can be suspended or even kicked out of the Google AdSense program altogether. It is a worry that you can actually get into trouble for something you didn’t do. There are ways to actual track click fraud. Companies who place ads on the Internet track their ads and who is clicking on them, as does Google. The more click fraud there is the less the advertisers might want to pay for their ads or they just might say the heck with advertising on the internet and pull their ads off. There have been lawsuits brought by Google against others for purposeful click fraud.

I am certain that anyone reading this article is not interested in how to do any sort of click fraud, the real problem is how can we avoid it. There are times we might commit or cause click fraud and not even realize it. There are a couple of things you can do to avoid causing click fraud. Do not click on any ads on your web pages that you are getting paid for. You might tell your family and friends about your new web or blog and they could ask or you could tell them that you get paid whenever someone clicks on those ads. They will want to help you with your new endeavor by going to your pages and clicking on all the ads. That could and in some cases would be click fraud, as unintentional as it is. Your dad might want to help you out and click on those ads as if the mouse were the channel changer on a Sunday afternoon. You need to warn them not to click on all the ads on your own web and blog pages. You have to explain this to them. That is one way Google finds out about click fraud, when ads are clicked on in very fast succession and all from the same Internet service provider (ISP).

Once your web and blog pages get more popular, you might consider buying and using actual click fraud-monitoring software. Click fraud can be traced as well with the ISP address of the person clicking. Another red flag would be if the advertiser is targeting a certain country and there are too many clicks from another country. Click fraud is bad for every legitimate person working on the Internet. Hopefully Google, Yahoo and the advertisers will get to the point where innocent people wont be kicked out of the AdSense program for something they didn’t do and advertisers wont lose money to fraud.

Feel free to click on other ads since that is what they are there for. I see interesting ads all the time on the Internet and if it looks like something I will be interested in, I bookmark it for future reference, you can also learn a lot just by reading ads.

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